Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Barastrondo" data-source="post: 5403264" data-attributes="member: 3820">In the MMO business, people contrast the sandbox with "theme park" play. The point of the experience is to go on the rides and see the featured attractions. WoW is a theme park MMO, for instance, and its opposite would be the sandbox that is EVE Online. You could make the argument that an Adventure Path is sort of a theme park: each adventure is a ride, and you're pretty much touring the park. I think railroad's a useful (and not entirely perjorative) term, though, because it can be fairly objectively defined: can you leave the rails? Whether or not players want to determines whether the game is good or not. Some people won't ever want to play or run a railroad, but if you have a group that likes roller coasters, you might be fine.I tend to think of a keyed dungeon map as a situation, and the intended actions of a bunch of NPCs as a plot. So, for instance, the classic I6 Ravenloft has a situation in the form of a castle map; it assumes that this is the castle as the players arrive. But it also has a plot: what Strahd wants, what he's going to actively do to get it, and so on. The plot is in part crystallized when you use the card mechanic to select his goals. Then when you get into an adventure where you need Situation A to resolve in one specific way in order to get to Situation B, which also has to resolve in one specific way, I tend to think of that as scripted. It might be a loose script, like an Adventure Path, or it might be a tight script, which is a railroad.</blockquote>

Verification